Comment by HPsquared
12 days ago
We've fallen quite far from the tradition of policing by consent as developed by Sir Robert Peel:
- Whether the police are effective is not measured on the number of arrests, but on the lack of crime.
- An effective authority figure knows trust and accountability are paramount. Hence, "The police are the public and the public are the police."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles
Edit: another choice quote from that article, from the Home Office itself in 2012:
"The Home Office defined the legitimacy of policing, in the eyes of the public, as based upon a general consensus of support that follows from transparency about their powers, their integrity in exercising those powers and their accountability for doing so."
The problem is the people nowadays can be easily convinced that everything should be accessible, because
Ekhm
They have nothing to hide and...
Ekhm
They will be more safe
Thus the arguments about fighting terrorism and paedophilia...
And in reality it has nothing to do with terrorism, nor paedophilia.
What does it have to do with in reality?
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I find this argument incredibly frustrating.
My view is that wide access to strong encryption carries non-obvious trade-offs, in particular with regards to organized crime. And I don't particularly mean paedophile rings, scooter gangs in London and professional burglars are organized crime too.
It's not that I have nothing to hide, therefore want the government to have unfettered access to everything. I want to ensure that properly overseen law enforcement and justice have access to normal info they need to prosecute crime, and if I have to give up a bit of privacy for it, so be it.
OK but how exactly do you propose to make that work? With current encryption technology there is no way to give up a bit of privacy: it's all or nothing. Either you have the keys or you don't. If a government has the key then it will inevitably be leaked or misused. The UK government in particular has long been heavily penetrated by Soviet / Russian intelligence.
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I don't trust anyone to handle my private details properly, especially not an institution that will suffer no repercussions should it mishandle those data.
Bits on a storage device can never (in anywhere remotely resembling a free society) be a crime by itself. Therefore, there is no justifiable reason for unfettered access to it.
If someone has done a crime, they must have done something, other than store bits on a disk. So go catch them in that act, the way criminals used to be caught before computers existed. If there is no act, there is no crime.
How to measure "lack of crime" if depends mostly on people responsibility than policing? You cannot put a policeman watching everyone and themselves.
E.g. I believe Oaxaca must have lower crime rates than Tampico simply because one is convenient drug port and other is not, not because better police.
> How to measure "lack of crime" if depends mostly on people responsibility than policing?
The thing is, a holistic approach to policing is key, and it's not just about putting bobbies on the street, it's far far FAR more what's needed to create a healthy society.
You need a social safety net for the unemployed, decent housing to prevent homelessness and its associated side effects (such as people taking dumps on the sidewalk), an accessible and affordable system of physical and mental health care, accessible options for education (not just of children but also for adults who need to switch careers for whatever reason), assistance programs for released convicts to find stable employment and a place to live, "third places" for the needs of all generations from young to old...
Police as an institution is absolutely needed, but in a healthy society it should be a matter of last resort, not a routine tool that kills or otherwise hurts people. When you as a government have to resort to hiring ever more (and ever more dumb, because the supply of smart people is limited) police to keep the peace, something has gone very wrong at the foundations of the stack that we call society.
Yes, that's exactly what I think: it's hard to measure police effectiveness when it's just a piece of the puzzle.
Measuring this relatively simple - sociologists take a survey, sample appropriately, and find out how many people are victims of crime, including ones not reported to police.
Ok, let's say it shows that Tampico has way higher number of crime victims. Is their police better or worse than another place with a lower number?
>You cannot put a policeman watching everyone
At least until we cover the planet in advanced technology, of which we are getting closer to every day.